Jess Payn: 'dark side of'

This piece clutches at coincidence, which lately includes the recurrence of the moon. 

The first moon is chosen. My eleventh tattoo: a one-earringed moon with deep frown lines, vomiting. Beneath it, a web footed horse has stalks of puke for its head. The moon is weeping fat droplets. Originally drawn in red ink as part of a series called ‘The Red Sketchbook,’ the drawing is titled ‘Crab Apple, Larch, Water Violet’. A posy of three. The hard, bad-tempered fruit, crop of a stubborn tree. The soft-needled conifer: worn or burned to ward off bad spirits. And then the submerged pond-dweller, the pretender: not actually a violet but a primrose. 

Only at the very end of the tattoo session, did I ask B, the artist, where the image had come from. It was not random but symbolic, she said. Vomiting moons are often her companions, literal analogues to the compulsive expulsion of matter that sometimes follows her meals. This refusal to digest food, she has realised, is intimately linked to her unwillingness to assimilate difficult feelings. Purging the food and the feelings is an easy way to fool yourself that they were never there.

Bulimia is a refusal of the present, I think.

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The moon is “full” in the drawing, perfectly round. Having pushed appetite to a point beyond satisfaction, the moon at least has the comfort of knowing that it will shrink: a return to the past is possible. It will shrink to the furthest possible point, retreat to the very beginning, until it is entirely “new”. “How to disappear completely and then return”.[1] This is what writer, artist and musician Johanna Hedva describes as the moon’s lesson. Self-erasure, with the knowledge that it won’t last. Across their writing, Hedva is interested in nothingness and voids: “these are all profoundly, viscerally present. They writhe and howl, they are HERE.”[2] The moon is a loud, expectant absence whose not-thereness is never reliable; we are always filling in the section that we cannot see.

In Minerva and the Miscarriage of the Brain, Hedva documents a performance with the moon, “trying to erase a memory”.[3] But the moon won’t help us get rid of things: “DURATION: a long time.”[4]

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I see the moon gathering things together lately. Looking at my tattoo it no longer looks like the moon is spewing out the horse. It looks like it is eating it. “The moon reflects back what we aim at it,” writes Nina MacLaughlin.[5] Am I hungry? For a greedy, magnetic moon to whom other, smaller objects are in thrall. The dictionary shows the moon drawing other words into its orbit: mooncalf, moon-fern, moon-face, moon-bathed, moonmilk, moon-dew, moon-glimpsed in the moon-mist… The moon exerts its pulling power on tides, lovers and the lost.

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Absent-minded moon, cypher to our shadow selves, satellite to the feelings felt in the dark, I am following you around. I am always stuck and you are always moving—out and in, like the month’s breath. You are a measure-maker despite your reputation for folly and fickleness. In more than twenty-four languages, moon and month are the same word.[6]

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The second moon is a stranger. I met her at a Späti (a corner shop, open late, often with benches outside). Even once we’d established our common languages, she alternated between French, German, Italian, Polish and English every second sentence—and repeated the same questions in each of them. Where are you from? Why are you here? How long will you stay? I asked B where she was from. Restless-eyed, she told me: the moon, but I’ve been in Berlin for eleven years now. Why did you leave? She had been jolly before, even riotously so—at one point she laughed so much she fell off the bench—but her expression changed at this question. She looked very intently at her fingers, rolled another filterless cigarette, and said she was not allowed to say. Then she stumbled to her feet, waved in my direction without making eye contact, and left me alone on the bench.

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The third moon is a book.[7] It is about a woman who moves to Berlin. The parallels between us are plain. She is lonely; the moon is a rare friend. Or is it? I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go. The moon texts her and asks to track her location, intent on pursuit. I have moved to a new city but the moon is following me around. It defines the different chapters of her story with its different faces: Hunger Moon, Thunder Moon, Grain Moon (after the Farmers’ Almanac). None of her other friends are named, all of them known by the moniker B (after Andy Warhol’s diaries, where Andy is ‘A’ and ‘B’ is anyone else). Her book is dedicated to ‘the heartsick’. There is whimsy in this waymaking. The moon has long been an emblem of dreaminess if not madness: to be a mooner is to be “half absent, half contemplative”. [8] But are the halves really so distinct? A binary like day and night; the dark side of the moon and its bright, watchful twin. Or does contemplation imply our absence, as we give in to the inner howl. The mooner has given up on direction. To moon: “to move or behave listlessly or aimlessly. Frequently with about, along, around.”[9] To act on a whim: to lose or, more accurately, surrender your control.

Lists are good containers for listless thoughts, predicated as they are on absences of consequence. The moon moves within and between this gathering of words. This is also an early meaning of “coincidence,” from the seventeenth century: “occupation of the same space”.

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The fourth moon is barely a moon at all. It is a death that I learn about in the morning from a text message. My grandmother. Ten minutes later I’m sitting on the balcony of our third floor apartment, scrolling through Twitter, and learn that a poet’s cat has died: “Pearl is on the moon now […] Loved her so much and am a bit fucking wrecked.” Ironically, it is Ascension Day; when I take the Ringbahn that encircles the city, just for the sake of circling, the platforms are busy and people are everywhere clutching beers in their hands. I watch a teenager rip the contents out of a cigarette and throw the empty husk on the floor. Around and around and around the train goes, while I wonder at the responsibilities of grief. Its entanglement with guilt. How to give it our attention. The train’s path is anti clockwise which makes it feel like the journey is unwinding itself. I fail to have thoughts. I am eager to get back to the beginning. 

On 26 May, the day Omi died, there was a total lunar eclipse: a Blood Moon. Caused by the orb falling into the Earth’s shadow, it looked like the moon was glowing red in the sky. 

[1] Johanna Hedva, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (CA: Sming Sming Books + Wolfman, 2020), p.113 

[2] Johanna Hedva and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, ‘absences and nothingness’, Art-Agenda, 17 September 2020, Conversations 

[3] Hedva, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, p. 100. 

[4] Ibid. 

[5] Nina McLaughlin, ‘Pink Moon’, The Paris Review, 26 April 2021, The Moon in Full column 

[6] Ibid. 

[7] The book is Amy Liptrot’s The Instant (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2022). Italicised quotes pp. 4, 1. 

[8] OED online ‘moon, v.’ refers to A. Smith Idler upon Town: ‘A mooner is an individual who moons about without object, half absent, half contemplative.’ 

[9] OED online, ‘moon, v.’

Jess Payn is researching flirting, fancies, distractibility, and whimsical poets and critics in the twentieth century. She is a PhD student at Southampton, funded by the SWW DTP, and her writing has been published in SPAM zine, The London Magazine, Review31, and theartsdesk, where she is books editor. She lives and makes linoprints in southeast London. She is also very fond of spoons.